A Force for Change!
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy discusses the making and impact of her animated short Sitara: Let Girls Dream.
Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy discusses the making and impace of her animated short Sitara: Let Girls Dream.
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s animated short Sitara: Let Girls Dream tackles one of the most important issues facing young girls in many countries around the world: how many are forced to abandon their personal dreams and marry older men through arrangements by their families. The beautifully animated CG short tells the story of 14-year-old Sitara, who dreams of becoming a pilot, but her goals are restricted by a middle eastern society that forces young girls to have arranged marriages.
“Let Girls Dream is an animated short film that was initially dreamt up many years ago,” says the multiple Emmy- and Oscar-winning Obaid-Chinoy in a recent interview. “When my team and I began researching and carried out a series of interviews with young girls around the world who had been forced into early marriage, what we most commonly encountered was that the girls spoke a lot about their dreams. They regretted the fact that they had to give up school, were no longer able to be with their friends, and unable to study and become doctors, lawyers or artists.”
After going through those recordings, Obaid-Chinoy felt there needed to be a film made about the dreams of young girls that becomes a conversation-starter between parents and children
something that could be shown on various platforms around the world. “When I began to write about the short’s protagonist Pari I always imagined her to be free and to be flying,” she says.
Labor of Love and Equality
The short was produced at Waadi Animations, Obaid-Chinoy’s own animation production company in Pakistan. About 40 people worked for 15 months to complete the production, using a variety of open software and proprietary software developed at the studio.
“Animation allows you to convey things that I feel live-action and documentary films cannot,” she notes. “Animation is also not considered a threatening medium — parents watch it, children watch it. You give life to characters that shine on screen, they sing, you use music – it’s possible to reach two different audiences (parents and children), and I think that child marriage is such a sensitive issue in so many countries, including mine, that creating a film that spoke about that issue seen through the lens of the dreams of a young girl was hugely important.”
The filmmaker and her team have been able to show the films at schools all around the world in the past five months. “In almost every school we have been to, there have been thoughtful discussions — sometimes with parents or with just the students — and in some of the communities that we have been screening the film, child marriage is in practice,” says the director. “Animation allowed us to get our foot in the door so that we could at least have that conversation.”
Obaid-Chinoy, who won two Oscars for her hard-hitting documentaries Saving Face and A
Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which examined contemporary issues faced by women in Pakistan, says her Karachi-based studio was set up so that she could create local heroes. “I wanted to present local characters for the children of Pakistan — because most of them had never seen a reflection of themselves on the big screen before. They could hear the language, they could see their clothes, they could see their streets come to life! While we were quite used to watching animation from Hollywood here, I thought our children also deserved to see more representations of themselves and that’s what motivated us to create animation.”
She says after Sitara: Let Girls Dream finally made it into the world, she and her team began to see the reactions that children, parents and audiences had and that gave them a lot of self confidence in their abilities to create animation, and to experience what it felt like to be part of the global animation fraternity.“My team that has worked on the film have one simple hope: that girls around the world will be inspired to achieve their dreams,” says the director. “If Sitara can play a small role in doing that (which we are already seeing happen during and after screenings), it gives us all tremendous joy and hope for the future.
Produced by Netflix and Waadi Animations, Sitara: Let Girls Dream is written and directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. For more info, visit www.letgirlsdream.org.
‘I want Waadi Animations to be a company where women feel safe, where they can come and create animation which allows them the ability to hone their skills, express themselves and display their own creativity.’
— Writer-director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy